Ramallah (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - Palestinian well-wishers have raised more than $60,000 to rebuild the Halabi family's West Bank home, demolished by Israel after one its sons killed two Israelis, organisers of the collection said Tuesday.

Mohannad Halabi, a 19-year-old student, stabbed two Israeli men to death in Jerusalem's Old City before police shot him dead.

The October 3 killings were among the first of the current wave of violence which to date has claimed the lives of 23 Israelis and an American in Palestinian attacks including stabbings, car rammings and gunfire.

And 149 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, most while carrying out attacks, seen by some as heralding a new Palestinian intifada, or uprising.

The Israeli army on Saturday carried out the punitive demolition of the Halabi home in the occupied West Bank village of Surda, near Ramallah.

Claimed by the militant Palestinian Islamic Jihad group as one of its members, Halabi is seen by some Palestinians as a laudable figure of resistance to Israeli rule.

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Palestinians count money during a fundraising campaign aimed at rebuilding the family home of Mohann …

The grassroots campaign to rebuild his family home took off quickly.

"In two days we raised $60,000," campaign coordinator Morsi Abu Ghueila told AFP, standing next to a large transparent collection box in a central Ramallah square, labelled "Mohannad Halabi, initiator of the Jerusalem intifada."

Inside lie banknotes in Israeli shekels, Jordanian dinars, US dollars and euros.

People are also donating building materials said campaign spokesman Abdel Karim Abu Arqub.

Standing in the ruins of his home, Mohannad's father Shafiq Halabi paid tribute to "the help of the Palestinian people."

The Israelis forbade him to rebuild it but he pledges that if they stop him, "I shall put up a tent here and return to live on my land with my children."

Israel has stepped up such punitive demolitions in an effort to deter attacks but it is condemned by rights groups as collective punishment against entire families.

Wall Street's disastrous start to 2016 has caused roughly $1 trillion to vanish from the stock market.

To put that stunning figure in context, it's like wiping out the combined value of the following tech giants: Google (GOOGL, Tech30)($508 billion), Facebook (FB, Tech30) ($281 billion), Intel (INTC, Tech30) ($154 billion), Netflix (NFLX,Tech30) ($50 billion) and Yahoo (YHOO, Tech30) ($29 billion).

The Dow's market cap has plunged by $310 billion through Monday's close, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices. That's equivalent to ExxonMobil (XOM) ($309.5 billion) being erased from the index.

The Nasdaq, the star of 2015, is also off to a terrible start. It's down about 7% so far in 2016 and on Monday notched its eighth losing day in a row. That's the longest losing streak for the Nasdaq since 2008.

Small-cap stocks are getting rocked even more than their larger cousins. The Russell 2000 has already tumbled 7% this year and narrowly avoided closing on Monday in a bear market, which signals a 20% decline from previous highs.

No wonder there are lots of signs of rising fear on Wall Street. CNNMoney's Fear & Greed Index is now flashing "extreme fear," a dramatic reversal from "neutral" just two weeks ago.

Related: Nearly half of U.S. stocks are in a bear market

The good news is that U.S. stock markets have stabilized a bit this week as things in turbulent China have calmed a bit. The Dow notched a tiny gain on Monday and then jumped more than 100 points shortly after Tuesday's opening bell, although those gains quickly fizzled.

"The risk of a full-blown bear market remains low without a recession, which our economists see as unlikely," Bank of America Merrill Lynch U.S. equity strategist Savita Subramanian wrote in a client report.

However, Subramanian does think "some near-term caution is warranted until earnings growth improves."

That may take some time. Fourth-quarter earnings season, which unofficially starts this week, is expected to reveal the first back-to-back decline in corporate profits since 2009, according to S&P Capital IQ.

Cheap oil prices are a big driver of shrinking profits as well as the recent slump in the stock market. Eight of the nine worst performers in the S&P 500 have exposure to the energy market, led byFreeport-McMoRan (FCX) and Williams Companies (WMB), which have plummeted 44% and 34%, respectively just since the beginning of the year.

Related: Sell everything! UBS says 2016 will be a 'cataclysmic year'

It's not just oil stocks getting beaten up though. Well-known S&P 500 stocks already down more than 10% include AutoNation (AN), Wynn Resorts (WYNN), Under Armour (UA) and Chipotle (CMG).

In fact, less than 10% of the S&P 500 has gained ground this year. And some of the early winners don't paint a pretty picture. For example, the best Dow performer is Wal-Mart (WMT), which analysts say is likely benefitting from concerns that an economic slowdown in the U.S. will force consumers to pinch pennies.

Macy's (M) stock has soared 9% this year. But most of that positive response came after the retailer announced plans to cut thousands of jobs. That's hardly a vote of confidence in the future.

Still, some think the early 2016 market freakout has been overdone. After all, the U.S. economy continues to grow. Morgan Stanley thinks the recovery from the Great Recession could actually last until 2020, making it the largest expansion in post-World War II history.

"Last week's selloff reflected fear more than fundamentals," David Kelly, chief global strategist at JPMorgan Funds, wrote in a client note.

"In the long run fundamentals should prevail -- the trick for investors is to recognize this early enough and get invested appropriately before these fundamentals are once again priced in," he wrote.

Editor’s Comment: There’s little doubt this thing could spread. It’s all interconnected globally now. If the Fed raises the temperature here, it gets hot across the globe. If China panics and runs for the exits, people watching from Wall Street will run out of their towers, too.

The animal instinct has been chained to the highly-complex computerized model, and the entire market has been rigged for some time. The process now is just squeezing to pick winners and losers as the money supply contracts, and the wild, illusory game of Russian roulette places a call on that bluff.

The China Syndrome: The Coming Global Financial Meltdown

by Charles Hugh Smith

All the phantom wealth piled up in China’s boost phase is now melting down, and the China Syndrome will trigger a meltdown in global phantom assets.

The 1979 film The China Syndrome took its name from the darkly humorous notion that a nuclear reactor meltdown in the U.S. would burn straight through the Earth to China.
(wikipedia: The China Syndrome)

In today’s world, the financial meltdown in China has burned straight through the global financial system to the U.S. financial markets. The mainstream financial media is delighted to promote the many links between the U.S. and Chinese economies when the two economies are feeding each other’s expansion in a tightly coupled virtuous cycle.

But once China’s slowdown starts impacting the American economy, the mainstream financial media trundles out the usual pundit suspects to declare that the U.S. and Chinese economies are decoupled, so a meltdown in China will have little impact on America–and vice versa.

The rationalizations for this decoupling are many–and specious. Exports are actually only 10% of China’s economy, we’re assured, so any slowdown in China will be modest and of little relevance to the U.S. economy.

Various experts also assure us that China’s vast stash of foreign reserves and U.S. Treasuries will enable it to quickly smooth over any spot of bother in its currency (RMB/yuan) resulting from capital flight out of China.

None of these rationalizations change the fact that China is integral to the global financial markets, and so its slowdown and capital flight are toppling carry trade and other risk-off financial dominoes.

China is tightly coupled to the U.S. and global economies via capital flows and supply/demand. It’s important to understand that demand drives profits on the margins: of ten sales, the first nine sales just cover production and overhead costs; only the last sale generates substantial profits.

China has provided marginal demand in everything from iron to oil to machine tools. Now that China’s demand is faltering, global demand is weakening and profits are collapsing because China provided the critical marginal demand that fueled immense profits.

This decline in marginal demand is crushing commodity-based economies and triggering recessions as profits, sales and wages all decline.

The tidal wave of cash flooding out of China has provided marginal demand for high-priced real estate in Europe and the U.S. From London flats to Chateaux in France to single family homes in Vancouver B.C. and Southern California, trillions of yuan have escaped China and flowed into pricey real estate, pushing prices into the stratosphere.

Now that trillions of yuan of phantom wealth are disappearing in China, those immense capital flows into Western assets are drying up. A staggering percentage of China’s household wealth is tied up in illiquid and overvalued real estate. The wealth that is yet to be lost as China’s markets transmit the reality that the fuel of financialization has been consumed and the resulting losses will be in the trillions of dollars, not yuan.

The fundamental context is that China’s economy has traced out an S-Curve–as have previous fast-developing nations such as Japan and South Korea.

The S-Curve can be likened to a rocket’s trajectory: first, there’s an ignition phase, as the fuel of financialization and untapped productive capacity is ignited.

The boost phase may last for several decades as credit-fueled production and consumption expand: